President Trump’s spokeswoman maintained Friday that all of the women who have accused him of unwanted touching or kissing were lying.

“Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning, and the president has spoken on it,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said when asked if Trump's position on accusations against the president was that "all of these women are lying."

Oct. 27, 2017, 9:54 a.m.

Days after North Korea threatened to test a nuclear weapon above ground, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis visited the Demilitarized Zone that divides that country from South Korea and declared: “Our goal is not war.”

On Friday, he visited the heavily fortified border area, where U.S. and South Korean troops maintain a constant presence opposite North Korean forces. Mattis stressed the need for a “diplomatic solution” to the tensions with Pyongyang, which have been building under President Trump, who has repeatedly sent more provocative signals, especially on Twitter.

“North Korean provocations continue to threaten regional and world peace, and despite unanimous condemnation by the United Nations’ Security Council, they still proceed,” Mattis said. “As Secretary of State [Rex] Tillerson has made clear, our goal is not war but rather the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

Oct. 27, 2017, 7:52 a.m.

The Trump administration belatedly has taken the first steps toward imposing new sanctions on Russian officials to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 election.

In early August, after considerable delay, Trump signed into law a measure that required the new sanctions, which target individuals with ties to Russian defense and intelligence agencies. Under the law, companies that do business with those individuals could be subject to U.S. sanctions.

The law gave the administration until Oct. 1 to produce a list. After the administration missed that deadline, members of Congress and others have stepped up criticism of Trump on the issue. Late Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson authorized officials to release the list to key members of Congress.

Oct. 27, 2017, 7:10 a.m.

Kosmoceratops, one of more than two dozen new species of dinosaur discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. (Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk)

The creature looked like a three-ton rhino crossed with a tropical lizard. Ten little horns dangled over its giant forehead like frills on a jester’s cap and two more perched over the eyes. Spikes poked out of each cheek. A blade jutted from its nose.

Paleontologists suspect this freakish beast, named kosmoceratops, was brightly colored to attract mates. It prowled the coastal swamps of southern Utah 79 million years ago.

It is one of more than two dozen new species of dinosaurs discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante in the 21 years since President Clinton preserved it as a national monument.

Oct. 27, 2017, 4:35 a.m.

On his first visit to the tense but eerily quiet frontier between North and South Korea as U.S. secretary of defense, Jim Mattis conveyed the message he hopes will win the day: Diplomacy is the answer to ending the nuclear crisis with the North, not war.

He made the point over and over - at the Panmunjom "truce village" where North literally meets South; at a military observation post inside the Demilitarized Zone, and in off-the cuff comments to U.S. and South Korean troops.

"We're doing everything we can to solve this diplomatically - everything we can," he told the troops after alighting from a Black Hawk helicopter that had ferried him to and from the border some 25 miles north of central Seoul.

Oct. 26, 2017, 6:04 p.m.

President Trump’s voter fraud commission, already facing several lawsuits, will now be investigated by a government watchdog.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, announced Thursday that it has accepted a request by Democratic lawmakers to review the commission.

In an Oct. 18 letter requesting an investigation, Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota wrote that the manner in which the commission is conducting its work “will prevent the public from a full and transparent understanding of the commission's conclusions and unnecessarily diminish confidence in our democratic process.”